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As surveillance technologies become ever more pervasive, how can we protect our privacy and resist corporate and state control? Join Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal and a leading voice on tech ethics, for a crucial conversation on the rise of surveillance, the power of AI, and what we can do to fight back.
The conversation will be moderated by Stéphan-Eloïse Gras and Rachel Donadio.
About the speakers:
Meredith Whittaker is Signal’s President and a member of the Signal Foundation Board of Directors. She has over 17 years of experience in tech, spanning industry, academia, and government. Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU, and served as the Faculty Director of the AI Now Institute which she co-founded. Her research and scholarly work helped shape global AI policy and shift the public narrative on AI to better recognize the surveillance business practices and concentration of industrial resources that modern AI requires. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also helped lead organizing at Google. She was one of the core organizers pushing back against the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on privacy, security, artificial intelligence, internet policy, and measurement. She recently completed a term as Senior Advisor on AI to the Chair at the US Federal Trade Commission.
Stéphan-Eloïse Gras is a researcher and entrepreneur specializing in the geoeconomics of AI. An assistant professor at CNAM-Paris, she explores AI technologies through the lens of software & critical data studies. She also serves on the board of Probabl, an AI company built around the popular open-source library scikit-learn. With 15+ years in the digital sector, she has led initiatives at the intersection of innovation, research, education, and emerging markets. As CEO of Digital Africa, she oversaw a €130M initiative supporting African startups. She also co-founded Africa 4 Tech and led OpenClassrooms’ strategic expansion in Africa. Her doctoral research traced the rise of AI through a music recommendation algorithm acquired by Spotify. She teaches at CNAM, Sciences Po, NYU, and Sorbonne and is currently writing a book on the geoeconomics of AI, describing LLMs as “belief-making machines.”
Rachel Donadio, the Library’s Curator of Cultural Programs, is a Paris-based writer, journalist and critic, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former European Culture Correspondent and Rome Bureau Chief of the New York Times.
